Land Lawsuit Lands on Linden Lab
by Alphaville Herald on 09/05/06 at 1:12 pm
SL resident Marc Woebegone is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. According to a press release, Marc’s typist, Marc Bragg, has filed suit against Linden Lab for a few land deals gone sour. While comments on this Clickable Culture post indicate an exploit may be involved, it should be interesting to see how the courts handle what may be the first civil case fought over virtual assets. Marc apparently “learned of a way to purchase virtual land significantly below market values,” then was surprised when the Lab banned his account. Hmmm. . . . More thoughts at 3pointD.
Plastic Duck
May 9th, 2006
What does he hope to accomplish when LL’s policy clearly states that they can close your account whenever they want, for whichever reason they choose?
Maybe I should hop on the bandwagon and sue them for closing my account, and not adhering to the policy of auctioning my land and giving me the value of it minus the $100 processing fee. I know for a fact some of that land I owned at the time was worth a lot more than $100. Hell, at one point Pathfinder offered me L$10,000 for my 16sq.m plot in Ambleside that I noticed someone else has recently purchased.
One Song
May 9th, 2006
Now thats some news worthy of read! Keep us informed on the outcome of these events. Good story! Can’t wait to see how that turns out. Good luck to Mr Marc Woebegone.
Raymond Polonsky
May 9th, 2006
Ok, this is either going to help or hurt players. I agree that consumer and contractual laws apply to Linden Lab as Mr. Bragg stated. However, with the wording of this lawsuit, this will challenge the entire in-world economy and business owners. The EULA and community rules have certain protections. For example, buyer beware.
However, what happens if the courts rule (like they have in other countries in the past) that individual players as a result of this case are responsible for damages? I think that is a good think to an extent. For example, Anshe Chung rips you off you can take action. This will be bad in some cases though. All the mobsters for example could face real world jail time for stealing a few thousand Lindens from someone.
Frankly, I think the minute you log in, you should be bound by the in world laws versus the real world laws. Otherwise, and I know online games differ, we would all be locked up for playing grand theft auto. It’s your option to play the game, it’s also your option to run a real world business in a virtual world knowing the game rules.
How many players want to face civil or criminal action as a result of a sour deal in game? That is what this lawsuit will clear or set based upon it’s wording. Granted it is aimed at Linden Lab, it’s wording gives an open door to this type of action occuring depending on how the courts rule.
Raymond Polonsky
Virtual Lawyer (Role Playing One Only!)
Annoyed Resident
May 10th, 2006
Maybe LL shouldn’t have taken the first jab, so to speak.
I guess threatening players with real world action (FBI) wasn’t such a good idea after all. If LL wants to punish people in the real court system, they themselves should also be held accountable for “injustices” as well.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think real world action is appropriate for anyone. Griefers should be punished in the game world, with a ban, whether it works or not. LL should be punished in the game world by accepting that they made a mistake and getting on with their Second Life without blaming every single problem on malicious intent.
Prokofy Neva
May 11th, 2006
Oh, please. Why am I not surprised that the usual criminal-minded grid-crasher and griefers are ganging up and trying to justify the commission of crimes in SL? This is so typical of the Herald! Tranny Pet will be along now any minute with righteous indignation about how injured Marc Woebegone was because his stolen property was lifted from him! This is what Uri would call total post-modern word salad.
The story is like the story of a teenager finding a car with the car keys in it, taking it for a joyride, then selling it, the the police catching up with him, then him whining that not only did they seize “his” car back they took away “his money” from the sale of the hot car.
Marsellus Wallace
May 11th, 2006
There is a big difference between what you just described Prok and what is going on.
Marsellus Wallace
Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.thesimmafia.com
Plastic Duck
May 11th, 2006
Prok, if you’ll look at new land parcels put up by LL that are purple (auction land), they’ll have an auction ID under the land properties. This auction ID is listed so that you can go on LL’s website and look up said parcel. This is EXACTLY what Marc did. He looked up land that LL had put up for sale. Now who’s fault is it that LL listed said land at only a few bucks?
Like I’ve said in past comments, LL should be happy that people like this come around and are quick to exploit LL’s faults. What if this happened a year or two from now, when SL’s projected population will be exponentially bigger? There will be more people who are smart to these kinds of blatant problems and the fallout could have been much worse.
LL made the mistake of banning Marc when he didn’t even violate any policies. This isn’t the first time they’ve made this mistake. If they continue to promote bitching among residents by promoting the filing of abuse reports over silly drama then things are only going to go downhill. People are starting to game things like abuse reports and other stuff too. It’s a common occurence with goons that after shit goes down and people file ARs, we just fling an AR right back and the issue often gets dropped as a “resident dispute” with no bans or warnings.
Take an example from every other MMO out there LL. Stop encouraging bitching among players and start working with them to make your game better.
You won’t get rid of problems by banning people responsible and adding more words to your policies. The problems will only come back in larger numbers.
TrannyPet Barmy
May 12th, 2006
not quite Porky, but then you always do have a tendancy to distort what is actually said, or attempt to call analogies that dont fully correspond
Your analogy misses out something, analogy should be where the cops catch up to the kid, seize the car back, the cash for the stolen car, *AND* seize his legally purchased LAND.
Little bit different if you dont ommit the LEGAL parts isnt it Porky ? But like i said, you always do have a tendancy to twist things to fit your BS.
Fact is, like myself, Plastic obviously owned lands with significant value, that he purchased legally whilst in the game. Why should he lose the value of that land, when he is deleted from the game ? More to the point, why should some Linden get that land for free, having pushed Duck out of the game ? Even more to the point, doesn’t that also give rise to the possibility of Lindens abusing their power to the ends of personal gain ???
Fact is Porky, the cops wouldnt seize my house if i stole a car and sold it, they would just seize the car or the cash from the sale of the car, they wouldnt take my house and my land to, and even if they did, it wouldnt be given to one of the cops for free, to do as they wished, including selling at an infinite profit !!!
Surely the only way to deal with this in reality, in fairness to all parties, is that when an account is deleted for what ever reason, the value of all land in the game(at some given rate per m2) should be calculated, and then that amount should be given to you at the current US$ rate. The land should go back into land market, not just given to some Linden. As an alternative, perhaps your assets should be auctioned, and you receive the amount(US$) raised by this auction.
With out this in place, the system is by far too open to abuse by the powers that be !!!
On the note of 16m’s, i had around 75 of these not long before i got permbanned. Strangely, when speaking to Michael Linden(i think it was Michael) on the telephone over having been suspended one time, he commented “you do have an awful lot of small patches of land dont you Tranny ?”(or words along this line), looking back i can just picture him rubbing his hands togethor, since a few weeks later, i was permbanned. Strangely, most of my lands had Linden names on as owner not long after that !!!
Any way final note to Porky, seems now things are coming to light, that it wasn’t just me making stuff up when i got permbanned, not whining, not whinging, just telling it how it was, and now with this thread, it seems i’m not the only one who’s suffered this. I wonder how many more scams certain Linden’s and cohorts there at LL are pulling !!
TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE
Vinci Calamari
May 16th, 2006
The problem iN SL is indeed that on the one hand LL says “they can close your account whenever they want, for whichever reason they choose?” (quoting Plastic Duck above) and on the other hand they say that you can own property. But if you can have property nobody should be able to just kill your identity – because without an SL identity you are stripped of your property. I am not sure how to solve this but either it is a real property – and then you haveto have the same rights as in RL or it is not.
Vinci
Prokofy Neva
May 16th, 2006
This is exactly the sort of malicious literalist bloody-mindedness we’ve come to expect from PD and TB and all the rest — the sort of thing that says it’s ok to use exploits to put a malicious script to generate particles with pictures of the Half Life guy or that dreadful tub girl in share-with-group objects in Ravenglass and cause horrendous griefer attacks, hmmm?
We all know that there are numbers on the purple land, and people use the numbers to find the auction for something they’re interested inworld (they actually more normally and typically just look at the rather short auction list of one page and find the sim and number/meters there). I think auction numbers like that didn’t even always exist, they used to have just name and meters but too many people were doing chargebacks saying they bid and bought “the wrong properties”. I’ve made that kind of mistake honestly myself, bid on something I thought I had seen in world which was merely next to it but the pictures looked similar. So numbers are meant to help in finding the legitimate, open, posted auction.
What Marc Woebegone did however was to take a number of a purple parcel that was only in the queue, not yet posted. He used it to force open an auction that was not yet posted on the list. That’s easily established, that it was not on the posted, official list, until Woebegone forced it open with his crowbar. Just because a door opens with a crowbar doesn’t mean it isn’t breaking and entry.
Once he plugged in the number and forced the HTML browser address to return, it opened up a page with “bid $1″ which was out of queue, out of order, and illegitimate. It’s easily established that there are never bids for that because Lindens always post a list, and post $1000 opening bids. So all Marc did was use an exploit to *force open an illegitimate auction*. No normal usage here, and it is theft as such. It is exactly like leaving the keys in the car and then finding some joyrider has stolen it AND sold it AND had a hysterical fit when the police arrested him, confiscated his ill-gotten funds AND don’t give him his money back.
LL did NOT list the land for a few bucks. Mark Woebegone *forced a mechanism to work out of order* and forced it to illegitimately open at a $1 then bid with alts to get it for $5 or whatever. So it’s all bullshit.
That you can modernist word-salad this to death only reveals your immorality and illegality, not anything that LL did wrong.
The question of whether PD’s property should also be confiscated if he has found to commit a criminal act in the game, like crashing the grid deliberately such as to cause property damages, is one to consider, and I could only say that due process should be used in such cases. You would have to determine the nature and extent and seriousness of the offense and its damages. Ultimately, the Lindens have their TOS language to invoke — we signed a TOS that said they could take away our play money and play houses at any time — and they do.
Tranny, there is nothing legal about his purchased of land. It’s illegal, because it pries open a door that was not open on a parcel that was not posted yet. To call that “legal” is again, to reveal your own criminal cast of mind, looking for literalisms and loopholes at every turn just to justify your own hedonistic and malicious actions.
As to whether your land should be liquidated and the cash turned over to you if you are banned, I’d have to see their rules on that. I thought at one time they had some rule like that. It might be reasonable for them to consider that if they suffered damages from your grid crashing, they might need to freeze your assets until such damages are covered. If your permbanning isn’t related to some damage like that, it might seem reasonable, but I think they should look at this on a case by case basis.
Cocoanut
May 16th, 2006
TrannyPet says, “With out this in place, the system is by far too open to abuse by the powers that be !!!”
Actually, abuse of power is absolutely built into the system now.
There used to be a rule that Lindens couldn’t run their own businesses as alts and profit from them personally.
That rule was changed, because they wanted to recruit residents to become Lindens who didn’t want to give up their lucrative businesses.
Thus, we are only at the beginning of this sort of thing, and you ain’t seen nothin yet.
coco
Marsellus Wallace
May 17th, 2006
I agree with you Prok on how you explained it this time. However, I will say LL should have closed that exploit. At least here in California we have false advertising laws. If a store mistakenly has something posted for 1 price, even if it is a mistake, until they correct it they have to sell at the mistaken price.
Now that doesn’t mean someone can come in fraudulantly make up prices and claim false advertising. But in this case, LL should have it so that you cannot force it like you describe. If their website says $1, technically they have to sell for that much. He didn’t create the website, however he did bend things to work in his favor. Whether that constitutes a crime though is another story.
Marsellus Wallace
Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.thesimmafia.com
TrannyPet Barmy
May 17th, 2006
Porky – again you try to put words that weren’t said into other people’s mouths, exactly where did i say it was ok to grief ? I simply said that should some one have their account disabled, then sure assets gained through ill means should be open to seizure, however, legally gotten gains, why should they or their value be withheld from the user ? Why should those assests or their worth fall into a linden’s hands ? If Marc did actually doing something outside of the Terms & Conditions to acquire the said lands, then, i totally agree, he should get nothing, however, i was responding to Plastic, and agreeing that the value of Plastic’s land and assets(decided via auction perhaps) should be refunded to him when they closed his account – the same as in most modern world law systems, the legal system will not touch your legally gotten gains, unless of course you fail to pay some financial penalty bestowed upon you by that legal system. But then, yet again Porky, instead of showing us some uber intelligent arguement around the facts, you show us your complete idiocy with your manipulations attempts, and poor attempts to cast dispertions over another’s word with silly generalisations and grouping ….. although, thanks for pointing out i am one of the “literalists” here Porky, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=literalist , perhaps you should read what a literalist deals with, REALITY, how things really are, something you’re evidently not too good at.
Any way, enough time wasted on Porky, i read the first paragraph of that post, and figured the rest would be pretty much the same, yet another 10 page manipulations rant, so chose not to bother reading any further
Coco – i totally agree, it’s part of the reason i’m not that bothered in being permbanned, the fact is that SL is full of it, and it’ll go the same way as any other corrupt society does, imploding on itself. You have to laugh at the irony though, LL throwing griefers out for putting up a few dodgy builds, or blowing up a few too many clubs, but by comparison, the Lindens and friends, the amount they’re probably taking in backhanders and permbanning competition for their friends, or the amount they’re taking from accounts after permbanning them, well i’d say the act of griefing pales in insignificance, lol total hypocrisy. But still, like i say, ultimately it will implode, at least all the while there are folks like Porky around to lick linden ass and allow it to continue. But then lets be literalists about this, Porky *has to* lick linden ass, he/she/it has alot to lose if for any reasons the Lindens should decide to permban her/him/it and not return the worth of his/her/it’s assets …….. now perhaps if you could at least get your asset’s worth back after being permbanned, more folks would be more easy about speaking freely of SL, instead of only speaking what they think the Linden’s want to hear for fear of losing everything, but then maybe the Lindens wouldn’t like that
I’m sure though, sooner or later one of two things will happen, if not both :-
a) Porky falls foul of the SL abuse reporting system and sees what it’s like to be on the other side of a failing and very exploitable abuse system
see if he/she/it continues to rant the same stories then.
b) SL falls to pieces due to total user disinterest once it become mainstream knowledge that despite trying to portray it’s self as some wonderful online utopian community, it’s probably one of the most corrupt and almost fascist communities out there !! Like Marsellus said in another thread “judge jury and executioner all in one body”, sounds awfully like a fascist state to me, and certainly no utopia.
in either case, i’ll be here, waiting to laugh my self stupid
TrannyPet Barmy
The REAL ONE
permbanned & happy
ps. nice to see that more posters are now actually seeing Porky’s manipulations.
Plastic Duck
May 17th, 2006
Prok, being in the land business you know as well as I do that in the past when new sims went up, the land was red and not for sale. The problem here is that they probably hired someone new and didn’t train them to properly open up sims like they’ve done in the past. Said person opened the sims as purple, with auction IDs, and starting bids of $1. Nothing was forced, nothing was exploited. These sims were active and on the auction roster. They may not have been on the front page of the auction list, but guess what, a huge amount of land for sale isn’t there. I recall at one point a parcel in Baku went up for auction, the parcel turned purple and was given an auction ID and then we were furiously outbid by Anshe until the auction ended. It was NEVER listed on the auction page, it only showed up on the finished auctions page once it ended. The facts here are that a Linden made a mistake and opened the sims improperly, and in the end, a resident got screwed out of money because of it. It wouldn’t be the first time a resident got screwed because of Linden mistakes.
And this is exactly why SL is a game. Their TOS is just a guideline, it’s often neglected and broken by Lindens themselves. You can’t take SL seriously when the creators themselves don’t take it seriously. They make empty FBI threads and hire virtual lawyers to scare the residents. It’s a joke. If LL had a legal case against online griefers, then a LOT more people would have cases against them. As for the whole grid crasher/land thing you mention Prok, I seriously doubt that someone who has invested any amount of money in SL that they didn’t want to lose would crash the grid. But even in a situation like that, why should LL be allowed to deviate from their own TOS? If they say that they will pay you the value of your land minus a $100 fee, then they should do so. There’s no ‘grid crasher’ clause in the TOS that says certain people should get less money given their actions.
One Song
May 17th, 2006
Prok if no rules were ever broke or bent a little we wouldn’t have a very efficient society. Prok have you heard of the famous expression:
“Rules are made to be broken.”
I totally agree with the legendary Plastic Ducky and “Tranny Boy”. And wanna know whats cool about them prok, instead of being like yourself with all due respect,
THEY ACTUALLY DID STUFF THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE IN SL, CONSTRCTIVE OR NOT,
which happened not to just invole didn’t involve speading countless hours typing long responses in the SLH and other popular locations. Ah, here is another popular expression for you: “Talk is cheap!”. Have a nice day ma’am.
Mike Rodot
May 20th, 2006
“invole didn’t involve speading countless hours typing long responses in the SLH and other popular locations”
ah…having problems with the long words are we?
Prokofy Neva
May 20th, 2006
Marsellus, an auction that doesn’t exist yet, isn’t *false* advertising, it’s *no* advertising. *The auction was not yet posted*. They forced it out of the queue, using an exploit.
One Song, land that the Lindens first role out is red, but then they make it purple and put on the auction ID number, and it goes in the queue. And it is NOT on the list until they manually *put it on*. So all that happened is that it was forced to appearl using an exploit. A Linden must put out the sim, and put it opening bid, usually at $1000. That was not done. Therefore it was not a legitimate auction but an exploit.
No, the Lindens didn’t open up shit. These residents did.
Your story about Baku isn’t any one I can check. I’ve never heard or seen of anything like that happening. I do see that sometimes Lindens in the land management thread tell residents who inquire about small parcels that they have “set them to sale”. This is an unfair and improper practice they do with small parcels that are too small for the auction, and which I guess they don’t want to make first land. But it’s not the usual procedure. They sure as hell don’t do that with a full sim that is brand new and for which the opening bid is $1000.
The fact that someone goes and bids on a sim *after* they are banned is merely evidence that they’re trying to push the system and make a point and then add to their litany of woes that the weren’t given a sim they purchased. Boo-hoo.
I believe I’ve done stuff to make a difference too, and frankly, more real stuff than anything they’ve done. I think this isn’t even an argument worth having.
Max Moore
May 21st, 2006
“I believe I’ve done stuff to make a difference too, and frankly, more real stuff than anything they’ve done.”
Hah…you are such a hypocritic. The only things you do are to further your own interests.
A most recent example being the griefing [yes, the griefing] of the librarian meeting whose transcript you post on your rag of a blog.
excerpt YOU = Prok
“You: You displace other residents’ initiatives by creating a meeting place and resources that draw away from other people’s activites
Lorelei Junot: Another example is if you wanted a research study done on some topic and some articles
You: you undermine their gruops, you see
Planetneutral Fackler: all we wanted to do was provide a forum that was requested of us by SL residents
Lorelei Junot: We would be happy to do that and provide that for you
You: and you do it with RL funding from grants that we don’t access, as we are world-indigenous
Pamzy Warrior: Prok you can say about any place in SL
You: The landscape has changed dramatically with the introduction of people like you
Kitten Lulu: we want a briefing on the land market, Prokofy could do it, on his own land, in a set of meeting organized by the library, using some signs to make it clear that it’s sponsored by both entities. Would this work for you?
Door: JBalla Thereian is at the door.
You: with RL funding accessing RL grants
Lorelei Junot: How do we underminen the groups?
Pamzy Warrior: change is good
You: and leveraging that over indigenous peoples
You: Not always
Planetneutral Fackler: what grant money?
You: sometimes it’s terribly distructive”
Basically you crashed their meeting and started attacking them as a pre-emptive strike to try and remove some business competition you see happening because that MAY have access to RL funding – that you are whine about that you can’t get…then run screaming and crying complaining [again, and again] unfair advantage! Just like rl, prok, it’s called competition…and the way you handle it by trying to paint yourself as some kind of saint looking out for the underdog is just completely bogus. Just another slumlord trying to remove the competition. If I were them I would report you for griefing in the most serious terms, as your postings above just go to further the facts that it is YOU who is delusional, not the rest of the SL population.
And wtf is that rubbish about indigenous people of sl? What drugs are you on, lady?
And how DARE you steal such a term from the rl that applies to so many rl cultures that have suffered death and deprivation in rl. AS IF some pissant slumlord trying to scam a few gold nuggets in a game world has any comparison or relevance to RL history and onging situations involving indigenous peoples.
Just because you have been a “member” [ie: ll client] of a game world for more than x months does not give you any more rights than someone who joins today.
Your ego truly does know no bounds. But, fortunately, what comes around does go around…
Marsellus Wallace
May 22nd, 2006
Dayem!!! Used and abused lol While it was a bit harsh, I gotta kinda agree with what Max says after reading that log. So what they have access to rl funding? I’m trying to get corporate sponsorship right now, does that mean I am undermining all the other groups out there as well?
First off, if you are halfway decent at this gaming/business thing you don’t need access to rl funding for that purpose unless you have a huge project you want to undertake. Secondly, so what if someone does get rl funding. More power to them.
Anything that brings more people, more competition, more creativity and more awareness to the game I embrace, not shun. However, let’s stick to the topic which is the lawsuit.
Marsellus Wallace
Boss, The Sim Mafia
http://www.thesimmafia.com
Sinjin Popinjay
May 23rd, 2006
I have a lawsuit-generated question for you, Marsellus. If Mr. Lawyer wins his case, and a RL precedent is set determining that virtual money = real money, won’t that effect your business? i.e. Make it a federal offense? Please excuse my ignorance but it seems as if Pandora’s Box could be an issue here.
Ruly Resident
May 24th, 2006
This shouldn’t be about personal attacks. If you don’t like a poster, too bad, talk about the issues, not your/their issues.
Anyway, a 2 sided point. 1: “Rules are made to be broken” is not a valid defense. If you break a law, you go to jail, you don’t get the judge saying “Aw shucks, you sure got us that time!”
On the other hand,point 2: It isn’t fair to promote a “real economy” in Second Life, then shut the doors as soon as someone is out of that not so real world. Marc shouldn’t get the value of the land he purchased, because evidently he didn’t purchase it at said value. He should however get what he DID pay back, since he didn’t profit. His punishment is being banned, not being broke. Linden Labs is not a heartless group of people out to screw everyone over. Like normal players, some are nice, and some… lack in the people skills. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to rip them off, one way or another. In trying to break down barriers between real and virtual, in areas where real money transactions are going on, there need to be real ways to guard against problems, for residents AND Lindens. I don’t believe Marc did something at all acceptable, however, I don’t think he should have to lose physical money for it unless and until there is a real-world fine written in to law to cover this sort of Matrixy gray area.
EULA Corruptor
May 31st, 2006
The days of MMO companies claiming the end all be all with a EULA are long gone. Even an exploiter in an MMO has some rights to his real life currency when involved in the shady bannings of Linden Labs. It’s extremley humorous to me that LL tries to get an agency like the FBI involved with their gaming community when real world currency should have never been introduced into the MMO market in the first place. Lets travel back in time a year ago and watch as nothing more than a grid crash here and there, or a push gun script would warrant a Linden. Now you see what the greed has sewn from them. They took over exchanges of real world currency themselves and got greedy and now they expect a real world law agency to govern that greed. The best thing the U.S. Govt could to for Second Life would be to slam the door on the sociopathic simulator all together and end the money laundering douche bag land barons and Linden brown nosers once and for all. Then maybe these Chineese sweat shop morons can get real jobs instead of buying parcels of digital shit to dole out to unsuspecting housewives and homebodies. Gotta say I’m sad to think I was once a resident of SL and bought into some of the bullshit, atleast I was smart enough to arm myself and actually took with me before being perma banned about $35 net gain profit from a nice plot of newb 512 parcel before I wasted any more of my time.
Of course my permaban was due to up clubs of douchebaggery and shemales. I still like to read about the antics of the Lintards tough.
Eep
Jul 25th, 2006
Not only is land owned by residents, but their objects (inventory “content”) as well, which I am in the process of persuing legal action against Linden Lab for unjustly banning my Second Life (SL) account and not giving me access to my content I have spent the last 1.5+ years creating. I own the rights to it so I should be entitled to it. See my SL website for more info.
konchan
Jun 30th, 2007
http://www.chescolawyers.com/
Marc S. Bragg is asking for donations :S
Reality
Jun 30th, 2007
“Not only is land owned by residents, but their objects (inventory “content”) as well”
Wrong – what you own is the idea of anything you create within Second Life. You do not own the network of computers that comprises the grid, you do not own the server space the ‘land’ takes up, you do not own the server space your inventory takes up.
sadly I know for a fact that few judges these days will laugh such absurd cases as these out of the court room … this is as absurd as the woman who sued McDonald’s for her own stupidity.
Meggan
Jul 11th, 2007
First off, the woman who sued McDonald’s for her own stupidity (spilling hot coffee) won millions and changed the way McDonald’s and all drive-thru companies do business. Secondly, you are talking about “intellectual law.” Unless you sign away the rights to something you thought up and created, the concept is yours. Corporations have, for decades, had their employees sign waivers upon employment stating that they agree that any concept they come up with while employed at the company becomes the right of the company. Corporations began this practice after numerous employees successfully sued their companies for their intellectual property.
berserk
Oct 5th, 2007
at least he won..
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/10/04/resolution-of-lawsuit/
Resolution of Lawsuit
Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 3:38 PM PDT by: Marty Linden
Linden Research, Inc., Philip Rosedale, and Marc Bragg have agreed to settle the “Bragg v. Linden and Rosedale” lawsuit currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The parties agree that there were unfortunate disagreements and miscommunications regarding the conduct and behavior by both sides and are pleased to report that Mr. Bragg’s “Marc Woebegone” account, privileges and responsibilities to the Second Life community have been restored. For the benefit of the Second Life community, the Parties have mutually agreed that the terms of their resolution shall remain confidential. The Parties ask that this confidentiality be respected.
Prokofy Neva
Oct 5th, 2007
He didn’t win. They had a settlement out of court. That’s not winning.
Say, is anybody else besides me marvelling that Plastic Duck really stuck his oar in on this one, siding with Marc Bragg?! Interesting, that.